Journey into Hip-Hop: Hip-Hop Was Dead (2/4)

 

This is Part 2 of a series of posts discussing my search for a particular style of hip-hop music. It isn’t intended to exhaustively cover the genre, so if anyone is inclined to deconstruct what I don’t know from these posts about what I think I know—feel free to educate me via a comment below or tweet @Gleaming_Sword.

“And something changed when commerce arrived. Good and bad stopped mattering; only effective and ineffective mattered. Whether a record worked on an audience became the standard, rather than whether or not it was any good.” –Questlove, Mo’ Meta Blues

By the late 90s and early 2000s, hip-hop music had risen to prominence in the music scene, but I didn’t like any of it. I felt like I should, because I’d never had anything against the genre, but a new aesthetic had taken over so that the triumph of hip-hop was simultaneously its death.

In his memoir Mo’ Meta Blues, The Roots drummer Questlove actually places the death of hip-hop a little sooner: the Source awards in May 1995:

 

They sat the artistic rappers, the have-nots of hip-hop, on the far right side: Nas, Mobb Deep, Wu-Tang, Busta Rhymes, and us. In the center of the place you had the Death Row crew and all the non-New York acts. On the far left of the place, you had the Bad Boy team. That room was like Apocalypse Now: The Hip-Hop Version. If you had sparked two rocks together the place would have exploded.

The divisions played out in the competition, with Nas’s Illmatic up against The Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die:

One of those two records, Illmatic, was done in the naïve old hip-hop style of just being a great album from start to finish, with great production, great MCing, a sharp perspective, and so on. The other album was done with an eye toward hit singles, and it succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

Questlove’s description of how the night progressed is sad:

So both albums were up for the same awards, and of course Biggie won them all. And for every award Biggie got I watched Nas just wilt in defeat, and that killed me inside.

The new dominant aesthetic was one of fame, riches, bitches, gang violence and racial epithets--but all in a sleek pop package. Real instrumentation, scratching, and gritty samples were less noticeable in the music or had disappeared altogether, replaced by a narrow band of weak beats, slower tempos, and cheap sound effects. The rapping was often sub-par, or so fast and contrived as to be incomprehensible, and the videos were Gatsbean nightmares of gaudy cars and suits, booty in thongs, Benjamins, Kristal showers, and overblown cinematic prologues and interludes (as in The Notorious B.I.G.'s "Hypnotize").

 

 

To this day, when you meet someone who says they hate hip-hop, this is why. There’s often a broader animus behind such comments, but many of the artists and the producers who pushed them were guilty as charged, and they steered hip-hop in a direction from which it has yet to fully recover. One review I saw for A$AP Rocky’s At.Long.Last.A$Ap (2015) recommended it as one of the best new hip-hop albums if you could overlook all the juvenile posturing and casual misogyny.

This is what constitutes praise in hip-hop today?

But no doubt I’m being unfair to some extent. Reviewing some tracks for this post, I found much more to enjoy in the music than I did back then. In Mo’ Meta Blues, Questlove mentions Jay-Z in the context of the genre’s Copernican devolution, but he also expresses respect, and indeed Jay-Z’s last major release, Magna Carta… Holy Grail (2013), showcases an impressive lyrical and musical versatility. Some reviewers said he sounds almost bored on the album, but I suspect that’s because he could rap wonders even in his sleep.

And yet I can’t help but sniff in derision when I see comments online describing music from this period as “old school.” Quite possibly, many today don’t know there was a time before . . .

Other posts in this series:

Arrested Development (1/4)
Mo' Meta Playlist (3/4)
Expanding Horizons (4/4)